Sundance 2015: ‘Mississippi Grind’ and Your Big-Buzz Breakout Hits
Once upon a time, there were legions of male actors who looked like they’d lived not one but several dozen lives — your Lee Marvins, your Robert Mitchums. The ranks of weathered, worked-over dudes have dwindled a bit, though you can still find a few: Tommy Lee Jones shows no sign of slowing down, Jeff Bridges finally aged out of pretty-boy territory and became the crusty character actor he was meant to be, and we’ll be checking back with you in a decade, Josh Brolin. But there aren’t that many marquee stars or sidekick-players left that suggest years spent in dive bars or an airport terminal’s worth of baggage without having to say a word. So when a new one of these types do come along, and they’re simultaneously given the perfect vehicle with which to demonstrate they’re a major talent, you want to scream hallelujah. Let us now praise flamed-out men.
The second that Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn shows up in Mississippi Grind, trudging through a third-rate casino in search of a poker table to park himself at, you get a whole backstory of hurt, despair and failure emanating off his hangdog face. You might recognize him as the psychotic uncle from the crime thriller Animal Kingdom, or as a corporate fat cat in The Dark Knight Rises, or from any number of peripheral roles as low lifes, meth-heads and fuck-ups. In this buddy dramedy-cum-road movie, he’s a middle-aged gambler who finds a soul mate in Ryan Reynolds — the latter of whom may be starting his official Ryanaissance period thanks to his stellar portrayal of a professional smooth talker. But it’s Mendelsohn who’s the man here, proving he can do sad sack, sensitive loser and small-fry dreamer with a calibrated subtlety that’s astounding. You start off simply happy to have discovered the second coming of Warren Oates. You leave the movie feeling that we may now have a new greatest-actor-of-his-generation contender.
Bonding over bourbon and bets at the dog track, Mendelsohn’s deflated Gerry and Reynolds’ human-charisma-machine Curtis decide to head south; there’s a big-stakes card game going down in New Orleans and Gerry needs to get out of town quick, so it’s goodbye Iowa and hello NOLA. They figure they can work the action along the Ole Miss and get their pot together, stopping to see a few long-lost girlfriends and bitter ex-wives along the way. Anyone who’s imagining a sort of Middle American version of Robert Altman’s cult classic California Split is on the money, though directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck don’t traffic in Seventies funky or sardonic, much less pastiche. What they do, almost better than anyone else in Indiewood, are character studies steeped in regionalism and neo-neorealism: the mix of Brooklyn hipsters and inner city youth in Half Nelson, the corn-belt small town playing host to a Dominican minor-league baseball player in Sugar. And while the duo jettison a specific sense of place here — everywhere from Memphis to the Big Easy basically gets the postcard montage treatment — it actually serves the story better. This is the America you see from the road, a series of interchangeable diners, juke joints and generic gambling dens.